lb_lee | Infinity Smashed: Marked and Gilded

Marked and Gilded
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Bob and Grey start chafing at the strictures of their workplace. Kink and sex. NSFW.
Word Count: 1560
Notes: Diptych freebie for fun. Plot is for the weak.

Marked

A low whistle. “Who’s the lucky lady, Grey?”

Grey pulls her shirt down, but it’s too late; the other gym rats have noticed.

“Well, well, surprise, surprise!”

“I thought you’d been less uptight lately. C’mon, who is she?”

“Nobody,” Grey says, shutting the locker.

“Bet you it’s Larkin. Is it Larkin?”

“Whoever she is, she’s feisty! Damn, man, have you seen your back?”

No, she hasn’t, but she remembers how it felt, Bob digging his nails in, his voice rough and full of laughter.

Normally, she’s more careful how she dresses and changes at work. But she’s so tired of being careful. As her coworkers rib her, congratulate her even, she wishes she could joke back.

“Meow! Kitty’s got claws!”

“Watch out, Grey, she’ll break out the whip!”

“Man, and here I thought you spent your off hours doing crosswords…”

They’re laughing now, imagining maybe a pretty girl in rubber. Grey just shrugs and lets them think it, which makes them rib her harder. When she leaves the locker room, Reyes follows and finds Bob waiting for his ride home.

“Doshi, you didn’t tell us Grey had a life,” Reyes complains.

Bob smirks. “Is that so? News to me.”

Grey gives Bob a look, which Reyes doesn’t notice. “I tell you, Doshi, it’s not fair,” he kvetches. “I’m young, handsome, I can carry a conversation, but no, old Ironass here is the one who looks like a rose bush jumped on his back!”

Bob’s expression freezes.

“Where did he even find this girl?” Reyes continues, oblivious.

Somehow they get away, but the drive home is tense. Bob is silent, lost in thought, and Grey’s shame chokes her throat. Stupid, stupid. He has far more to fear than her, she knows better, and without being told she turns to take him back to his place, not hers.

They’re almost there when Bob says, “I need to quit doing that.”

“No.” It comes out forcefully enough that he looks up. “My fault. Sloppy. Don’t stop. Please? I like it. Makes it—me—real.” Her throat locks.

Grey can’t tell her coworkers about Bob, how he tastes like coffee in the morning and sounds like velvet in bed, how he makes her feel small and precious and beautiful. She can’t tell them who she is, only show them.

Bob’s expression is torn. He loves doing this, she knows; he kisses the marks he leaves and plays with them for days afterward. But when he gets out of the car, he says, “The new management’s already sniffing around us; they find out I’m fucking you and we’ll both be burnt and washed.”

Grey can’t argue that. The storm at work may have passed them for now, but it rages elsewhere. The new hires are getting whiter and whiter as the old guard gets weeded, more women leaving than coming in. It makes Grey uneasy (Jews have been purged before), and Bob’s position is far shakier than her own. She’s lucky he’s not leaving immediately.

So she says nothing and Bob stops marking her for a while, even though they miss it.

Gilded

Bob has a lot of things, and he doesn’t like getting rid of any of them. He’s only been in Vago a short while, but he has twice Grey’s possessions and seems incapable of paring them down. At first, he tries to hide what he’s doing, but finally, he asks her for help: “You’re always so organized… and I don’t want to have to rent a truck the size of the last one.”

His expression is ginger. He’s trying to let her down easy, remind her that he’s planning to leave, move back to the east coast. But he’s never hidden that from her, so it doesn’t bother her to say yes.

They take on the bathroom first, where Grey finds the lipstick. Presuming it an ex-girlfriend’s, she moves to toss it, but Bob stops her.

“No, no, I’m keeping this.”

Grey looks questioning.

“Yeah, it’s mine. I did Rocky Horror, back in the day.” Bob uncaps the lipstick and gives it a twist. It comes up metallic gold.

“Show me?” Grey asks.

So after they toss the expired cleaning products and extra toothbrushes, Bob plops down on the couch and boots up his laptop to pull up the photos. Grey sits next to him, riveted.

Bob is young in these pictures, smooth and clean-shaven, with no glasses or gray in his (long) hair. But that’s not what stands out. No, what stands out is the gold: glitter over his eyes, bangles on his wrists, paint on lips and fingers. And his clothes! Grey didn’t know corsets came in gold lamé.

“Black is the traditional,” Bob says as he clicks through, “but it’s boring. Su gets all the credit, by the way; she took me shopping, made me presentable…”

Grey says nothing, just watches the younger Bob pose, wink, blow kisses at the photographer, hip cocked and hands dancing. This Bob she’s only seen glimpses of, shameless and uninhibited, fey and flamboyant. Show-stopping.

Grey can’t imagine ever being that confident herself.

“When?” she asks.

“Oh jeez, let’s see… late seventies? Yeah, grad school, I hadn’t quite had the queeniness steamrolled out of me yet…”

“What happened?”

Bob huffs a pseudo-laugh. “I started making money. And I got sick of other people’s bullshit.” With affected lightheartedness: “and shaving took forever.” Bob as a young man, smooth and clean shaving with long hair, striking a flamboyant dancing pose. He's dressed all in black and sparkly gold--a corset, fishnets and heels, gold bangles on his wrists, gold paint on his nails and lips and over his eyes. He's flagging black on his left.

Bob as a young man, smooth and clean shaving with long hair, striking a flamboyant dancing pose. He's dressed all in black and sparkly gold--a corset, fishnets and heels, gold bangles on his wrists, gold paint on his nails and lips and over his eyes. He's flagging black on his left.

Grey watches Bob’s younger self cavort across the screen, laughing and happy. She touches a finger to the screen, smiles.

“Beautiful.”

Bob looks raw and open for a moment; then he looks away. “You know, I even felt the same way, back then. Guess that’s why I bought the new tube when I was unemployed. I don’t know, here I was, stuck in this litter box city, and I wanted to feel good about something.” He shrugs. “Didn’t work; just made me realize how old and square I’d gotten.”

Grey brushes her fingers over Bob’s shoulder, clad in the usual polo shirt. She tries to speak, but the words get stuck.

Bob waits for her. Finally, Grey untangles: “See you in it. Please?”

Bob’s eyes spark. His body language shifts to pleased, confident.

“Oh really?”

Grey nods and Bob puts the laptop away.

It’s nothing elaborate—just the lipstick. But watching him paint his mouth gold is still a revelation. Watching him navigate his mustache feels intimate, and when Bob finishes and turns with a flourish and a, “ta-da!” there’s a note of hesitancy, like he’s not sure how Grey will react.

She just stares. The only point of comparison she has is Vicky, who only ever wore makeup at prom, and the effect was wasted on Grey. But Bob in lipstick is gilded, like the precious metal under his skin is visible now, matching the frames of his glasses, transforming him into something otherworldly.

“So?” Bob asks. “What do you think?”

Grey replies by kissing him, and under the gold, it’s still Bob’s mouth against hers, still Bob’s softness against her, Bob’s hands on her back. Grey pushes back into his hands, trying to get him to dig his nails in.

He doesn’t, but when he pulls back, he laughs. “Wow, this stuff smears right off.” He brushes his thumb over Grey’s mouth, then pauses. Heat comes into his eyes. “You look good like this.”

Hot and cold flash through her.

Bob reaches for the tube. “Let me put some on you…”

Grey swallows. She’s never worn makeup. She was never that kind of girl. Up until this moment, she never thought she’d want to… or could.

Bob’s waiting, looking at her questioningly. She squeezes for yes.

Grey knows she’s not like Bob. This can’t look good on her, not like it does on him. Her color, her build, it’s all wrong. But it’s obvious from Bob’s face that he doesn’t think so. His smile makes a zing go through her.

“I didn’t think you’d let me,” he teases, but in a nice way. “Pretty girl.”

She can tell he means it, and it gives her the shivers. “I love you,” she says.

Normally, that would make him draw back, brush it off. But here, now, it makes him purr, “damn right you do,” and kiss her hard.

Bob doesn’t bite or scratch her, but he leaves shining smears on Grey’s mouth, her neck, shoves her down on the bed and moves lower. Grey wants to keep kissing him, but not as much as she wants to be covered in gold, to wear it under her clothes to work, even if she can’t say who left it on her. She wants everyone to see it on her and know someone beautiful touched her, even if they can’t know it’s Bob. She wants him like this, golden and unstoppable, before he defaulted to wearing nothing but brown, white, and blue, before he took to fidgeting with his glasses to still his dancing hands. Grey wants everything.

A colored drawing done entirely in shades of blue, except for the bright gold lipstick Bob is wearing and has smeared across Grey's mouth. He's standing, leaning over her, touching her mouth with a knee pressed between her legs. He has a proprietary hand on her thigh, shoving up her gym shorts. Good? he asks. Grey, looking like she's thrilled to be there, squeezes for yes. Good, Bob says.

Bob touches the gold he’s left on her hips with such longing that she says, “keeping these.”

“You’re killing me, Grace.” But he doesn’t say no, and all the following shift, she feels his eyes on her. Even though nobody sees it, he knows it’s there, and she finds excuses to touch her hips in front of him, flirting with him in ways only he recognizes, and that evening, he drags her to bed, rips her clothes off, and dives into her lap to claw her back and bite her everywhere.

“You,” he growls, hips undulating, “are a tease.”

She beams at him. “Yes.”

He comes in her hand, telling her all the lovely things he does to girls like her, and gives up trying not to mark her after that.